Rise of the Night Stalkers

by Kurtis Eckstein

  Which meant, Savannah was a stranger to her.

  But wait…

  That didn’t make sense. Hadn’t I seen in her status that she was traumatized? Wouldn’t she need to recall what happened for that to be the case?

  I willed her stats before me.

  SUB-HANDLER 001

  Physical Condition: Stable

  Psychological Condition: Stable, Irritable

  Fatigue: 42%

  Mass: 26

  Strength: 102

  Endurance: 39

  Speed: 124

  Dexterity: 87

  Balance: 64

  Connection: 19

  Thermoacoustic: 1

  Attack: 917

  Defense: 386

  Sure enough, traumatized wasn’t listed anymore, which meant she really had lost her memories of what happened prior to waking up just now. That, and it appeared some of her stats had more than tripled! Strength, endurance, speed, and attack had all increased threefold!

  But why?

  She didn’t have the points available for them to increase, so how could they go up? Did the numbers change under certain conditions? Would her having been traumatized lower her stats, like a debuff in a videogame?

  Or maybe it was my bite…

  Or actually, it might have been the fatigue in general!

  Which, if that was the case, would my stats also go down if I became too tired as well? I supposed that made sense, especially considering these numbers were just a method of quantifying real-life conditions. And in real-life, people did get physically weaker when they were deprived of sleep.

  Needless to say, Savannah was brought to tears when she realized what was going on.

  Harper, on the other hand, balanced on the balls of her feet and sat back on her heels, her hands still on the ground, as she finally met my gaze again. It was a little strange seeing her with shorts and shoes on – the clothing didn’t look natural on my kind. If anything, it was bizarre, like someone wearing underwear over their shorts. Or in this case, like a knight wearing underwear over their hard metal armor – a ridiculous, almost comical, sight to consider.

  “She’s not a stranger?” Harper asked me directly.

  My brow furrowed. ‘Wait, you can really read my thoughts?’

  “Yes,” she replied simply. “And I guess my new name is Harper,” she added.

  I ignored the second part, not about to get into how it was already her name to begin with. ‘Why can’t I hear yours?’

  She hesitated as she considered that. “It almost feels like I shouldn’t have thoughts,” she admitted. “As if I was your arm, responding to your brain. Except I do have thoughts, like if your hand was to have its own mind, apart from yours.”

  ‘Huh, I guess it makes sense that my arm would normally ‘hear’ my thoughts, and respond to them, yet I wouldn’t sense any thoughts from it in return…except for like pain or temperature, so maybe it’s not the best analogy.’

  Granted, I was getting information about her, in the form of a hallucination about a foot from my face, so maybe the ‘my hand having its own brain’ analogy was a good one after all.

  ‘You’re pretty smart for your age,’ I added.

  “I don’t feel like I was always this smart,” she admitted. “How old am I?”

  ‘No idea.’

  Harper shifted her gaze, speaking to Savannah. “You, person who is apparently not a stranger. If you really aren’t, then tell me how old I am.”

  The older sister had been shifting her teary gaze between us, seeming dumbfounded by the exchange, especially considering I hadn’t said a word. Really, they all were stunned. None of the three guys were even holding their guns tightly anymore, now that Harper was acting civil.

  “Well?” the girl prompted again when she didn’t receive a response.

  “Ten,” Savannah responded. “And our brother is eleven. You two were together when you got separated from us. We’ve been searching for days and–”

  Harper gave me her attention again, ignoring her sister and cutting her off midsentence. “What should I call you?” she asked. “I feel indebted to you, but I don’t know why. It’s like I was drowning, and you pulled me out of the ocean. Or like I fell off a cliff and you grabbed me just in time.” She paused, her tone becoming flat. “Or maybe like I really am just your arm, and I’m supposed to do what you say, just because that’s what arms do. That’s their purpose.” She shrugged infinitesimally. “I don’t know.”

  Yep, raising her Connection stat must have actually increased her intelligence after all, because some of her language wasn’t what I felt was normal for a ten-year-old – at least, not unless her father or mother had been a lawyer or something.

  But then, what about me? My Connection stat was still low, but I felt like my intelligence was fine. So then, it was possible I was making too many assumptions. Maybe the physical change that her body underwent, when becoming a Night Stalker, was what increased her intelligence – it might have nothing to do with any stats.

  “Should I call you master?” she wondered when I didn’t answer her question.

  I growled out loud in annoyance. ‘What?! Hell no! No offense kid, but you’re on your own. I don’t have time to babysit.’

  Master? Where in the hell did that even come from? I mean, the hallucination I was seeing kind of seemed like script from computer software sometimes, which reminded me that programs often had relationships defined as master-slave, but that idea felt like it should be unrelated to this real-life situation.

  Or maybe, if I compared it to a standard videogame, then it made sense that the computer-controlled characters in the party would faithfully obey the ‘player’ – and if they didn’t then people would assume the game was bugged or broken.

  But that was a strange way to look at it – with the party member NPC’s being obedient servants to the player, operating on predefined commands either established by the player through a menu, or the system itself.

  Not to mention, this was real life, which meant those ideas should be irrelevant.

  So then, was she delusional? Did she thinking that calling me something like that would appease me? Or maybe the term just had a different significance for her than the average person? I mean, she was just a kid. One I didn’t have time for.

  Ugh, I didn’t need to deal with this shit.

  Her expression dropped, in response to my mental comment. “You’re going to abandon me?” she whispered.

  I growled again, noticing Savannah beginning to scoot away from my hostile composure. I didn’t have time to worry about a weakling. I had enough shit to deal with on my own.

  ‘I’m not your guardian!’

  “I’ll try to get stronger,” she pleaded.

  My eyes narrowed. ‘You want to get stronger? Then you’ll probably have to eat people!’ I retorted in my thoughts.

  She cringed, having the same reaction that I did at the thought – our human minds couldn’t stomach the idea.

  “Please,” she whispered. “A chopped-off arm can’t survive on its own.”

  ‘Can’t you just stay with them?’

  “I don’t know these people!” she exclaimed loudly, causing everyone to flinch at the abrupt change in volume. “Please! I’ll–”

  Unexpectedly, her voice cut off, probably because she caught me considering the one way in which she could be useful to me.

  “I can do that!” she exclaimed, bolting upright. “I can talk for you!”

  Shit.

  Dammit.

  Ugh.

  ‘Fine! But I’m not promising to keep you around!’

  “I’ll make myself useful,” she promised. “And I’ll try to get stronger.”

  ‘So you’ll eat people?’ I taunted her, just to do it – just because I knew she wouldn’t.

  She cringed again, unable to respond.

  I mentally pulled up her stats, curious about something else that I had seen displayed earlier when we synced, or whatever.

/>   Calculated Allegiance: 79%

  Condition Status: Acceptable

  Calculated Yield: 86%

  Condition Status: Acceptable

  Given the context, I realized allegiance must be the feeling of indebtedness she described, while yield might mean like someone yielding their will to someone else. But then, if we were essentially talking about obedience why not–

  Unexpectedly, the screen shifted in an instant.

  Calculated Obedience: 86%

  Condition Status: Acceptable

  Holy shit!

  It changed!

  Why did it change? Was all the information being provided to me going through the filter of my own personal knowledge? I mean, if this was my hallucination, then that had to be the case. But then, if that was the truth, why would it be ambiguous in the first place? And would Connection change too, if I wanted it to, or would that only happen if the word ‘Language’ was a perfect substitute?

  I decided to give it a quick try, only to discover that it didn’t change…

  Dammit! Too many questions and not enough answers!

  Harper spoke up again, directing her attention to Savannah, having picked up my passing thoughts. “My boss has–”

  I groaned in annoyance. ‘Ugh. Mason. Just call me Mason. Not master or boss, or anything like that.’

  Clearly, it appeared that she was trying to figure out some way to define what I was to her, possibly based on the awareness that she was under me in this supposed hierarchy – like an arm trying to define what the head was to it. But I had no interest in being anyone’s boss either.

  She quickly continued. “Mason has a lot of questions he wants to ask all of you humans, starting with what in the hell happened to the world, and why people have been turning into monsters.”

  I just shook my head, thankful to finally have a way to communicate, but annoyed as hell that it had to end up like this. Maybe I should have just taken the cannibalism option when I had the chance, raised my own Connection stat, and had one less problem to deal with.

  Harper abruptly took a step back, looking like she was going to pass out.

  Alert!

  Sub-handler 001 update.

  Physical Condition: Stable, Escalated

  Psychological Condition: Unstable, Terrified

  Shit!

  ‘Dammit kid, calm down! I wasn’t serious!’

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t confident in my answer though, which caused her to straighten up a little, and begin to tremble as she waited for whatever was next. I mean, no way in hell was I going to eat another person, but the hesitation came from knowing that I must have already done it.

  But there wasn’t a timeline where I would have done it earlier today, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now either. The idea was just disturbing and disgusting on so many levels.

  “Promise?” she whispered, her voice trembling.

  I just shook my head at the ridiculousness of this situation and looked away, finally standing up fully to tower at my full six-and-a-half feet, or whatever I was. Of course, she knew I wasn’t saying no to her question, considering she had insight into my mind, but it was obvious that the sudden two-foot difference in our height caused her anxiety to spike again.

  After a moment, she gulped loudly, shifting her red gaze to the humans. Then, looking like a white-haired girl who had slipped on jean shorts over a wetsuit – and had cut a hole in the material over her stomach – she moved her large midnight hands to her hips, with her elbows sticking out really far due to the length of her arms, only to speak again in an even tone.

  “Well, I believe I asked a question. Mason wants to know what in the hell happened to the world.”

  Chapter 6: Diet

  Well, shit.

  So these humans didn’t know what exactly happened. Dammit, a lot of good all my effort did. They didn’t even know how people were turning into monsters! Like, how could they not know that?!

  They assumed my kind was turning people, but no one had ever seen it happen. After all, it wasn’t like those who got bitten survived. Because if someone was unlucky enough to be attacked at night, then they disappeared altogether, leaving only blood behind – likely because they had been eaten…

  Still, how could they not know?

  Shit, I was about to bite one of these idiots myself, just to find out if it was like zombies or vampires.

  And I had plenty of idiots to bite too, since we had an audience now, though none of them left the superficial safety of the hospital. Instead, a group of people had gathered just inside the glass doors that was partially barricaded with cinderblocks and other junk, with the group straining to see and listening to what was going on. No doubt that news about me had spread when Savannah and Randy originally followed after the mysterious Night Stalker who had brought back one of their own.

  But of course, none of them were brave enough to step into the parking lot.

  Smart, in my opinion, even if the cinderblocks wouldn’t be much of a challenge for me to bust through. Like seriously, how had they even survived all this time with such a flimsy barrier? Just luck?

  In the end, I did learn a little.

  Basically, one day, almost five months ago towards the end of April, there were massive earthquakes all over the world, with the black towers growing out of the ground, destroying anything that had been unlucky enough to be above them. It wasn’t a fast process though. The ground shook for hours as they rose into the sky, with the cracks glowing bright red even during the daytime. However, these spires, which they called Hell-Thorns, weren’t everywhere.

  Instead, there were pockets of them of various sizes, all of them forming massive spheres, looking like a circle of random dots from satellite images.

  In total, the apocalyptic areas probably covered less than 20% of the available landmasses, though it still resulted in a ton of displaced people.

  At first, they called them Seismic Swarm Zones, but once the monsters began to appear, everyone began calling them Hell Zones.

  The humans had estimated that this particular grouping was about sixty miles in diameter – large enough to swallow up hundreds of towns and cities, blotting out a huge chunk of an entire state. Which meant that there were an estimated three-hundred glowing spires to be seen on the horizon, each being separated by anywhere from one to ten miles – although, most of them were within three to four miles of each other.

  However, there were even larger pockets of these foreign structures that supposedly were hundreds of miles across.

  So society hadn’t crumbled completely outside of these Hell Zones, but it certainly had within. And it wasn’t like people in unaffected cities hadn’t tried pooling their resources to help those in trouble. On the contrary, they had helped, especially on the outskirts, where ghost towns had been safely evacuated.

  But the problem was, we were smack dab in the middle of this Hell Zone, and there had initially been several million people displaced just in this state alone, never mind everywhere else.

  Which meant, even if the outside society hadn’t fully crumbled, it had been severely crippled from the cascade of ensuing events.

  First, the outskirt cities had been flooded with survivors, causing their resources to become drained, putting an unsustainable strain on the locals, due to a lack of housing, food, and even water to an extent. Then, when people began starving, crime rates rose, further escalating the situation.

  Had there just been one Hell Zone, then maybe the country could have handled the fallout, sort of like how they handled a hurricane destroying an entire state. But this was like a hundred hurricanes hitting the country all at once, crippling supply chains and overloading the system.

  Supposedly, the military had gotten involved, but this particular group of humans had never seen any of them, leaving them to believe that the government was making other locations a priority.

  And nuking all the locations wasn’t an option either – not unless they wanted to kill off the w
orld with a nuclear winter and poison much of the planet with radiation. In fact, some smaller nations had already done just that, negatively affecting the weather worldwide by accelerating global warming.

  Hence, it was now a very warm September.

  Which was ironic, in my opinion, making me wonder where all this information came from. I mean, I realized it was probably from them listening to radio broadcasts or something. But it just seemed ironic that a few nuclear explosions heated the planet – something called a nuclear summer, that would follow a localized nuclear winter – while a lot of them would cool it down significantly, due to the thick cloud cover it would cause globally.

  Thus, survivors like this group stayed here because it wasn’t much better than being elsewhere. It was either risk being killed at night by monsters, or guarantee starvation by trying to move to an already burdened location outside of the Hell Zones.

  And from the looks of it, these people really weren’t hurting bad at all.

  They had collected tons of food from various locations in the area, and they surprisingly even had running water and electricity, though they weren’t completely certain why. They had tried scanning the radio frequencies for any indication of another group being nearby, but hadn’t heard anything.

  According to John, he believed that a group like theirs had taken up residence at the city’s powerplant, keeping it functioning in order to have electricity for themselves, benefiting others in the process.

  Which I agreed made sense.

  Because, just like any other business, such a place had the necessities for people to live there if they had to. There would be plenty of offices to turn into sleeping areas, and plenty of bathrooms to take care of hygiene needs. Their only issue would be food really, but if it was a large enough group, then they would be able to scavenge, in addition to keeping the plant running.